Get your Rogues on

Two familiar veterans of election controversies, Bill Sizemore and David Hunnicutt, share this week's Rogue honors.

Both men strongly oppose Measure 26, the ballot initiative approved by Oregon voters in 2002 that mandates signature gatherers may not be paid by the signature. The two combined forces to try to get that worthy measure (WW endorsed it) overturned as unconstitutional but lost their bid last week with the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Now Sizemore and Hunnicutt may face bigger problems thanks to the measure and a recent local court decision against a company that gathered signatures for initiatives in which both men were listed as chief petitioners.

I didn't know that Sizemore and Hunnicut were still trying to get the Ninth Circuit to overturn 26. I figured the smack they got in February on the matter rendered it closed.

Fortunately, all of the chief petitioners whose initiatives paid by the signature can be in jeopardy. The Secretary of State should be handing out massive fines for the continual abuse of Oregon's citizen initiative system. The intent of the system was to give citizens the opportunity to organize at the grassroots level. It was never supposed to be Bill Sizemore's lunch ticket, no matter how much he pisses and moans about it.